Kudos & Kicks: Reviewing the good, bad and questionable

Kudos

Collier County’s crime rate continues to decline year after year, with the Sheriff’s Office announcing in March that the final numbers for 2017 showed a 2.1 percent drop from 2016.

The numbers reflect major crimes reported in Collier unincorporated areas and Everglades City, where the Sheriff’s Office has jurisdiction. Naples and Marco Island have their own city police departments, supplemented by the Sheriff’s Office.

The crime rate measures the number of major offenses for every 100,000 residents, as reported by the Sheriff’s Office to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Major offenses include murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, property theft and stealing cars.

The 2.1 percent drop follows a 5 percent decline to a 46-year low in 2016 when compared with 2015. The rate was 5,100 per 100,000 people in 2015, then 4,935 in 2016 and last year was 4,830, the agency reported.

“This is a result of a lot of hard work by our deputies and the community,” Collier Sheriff Kevin Rambosk said in a statement.

The last word in his quotation is key. We applaud Rambosk’s team for its emphasis on preventing crime through community partnerships, not solely relying on officers.

The Sheriff’s Office works closely with the school district, an identity theft task force, David Lawrence Center which treats addiction and the mentally ill, and mental health professionals to provide training to deputies to de-escalate crises before they potentially can turn violent.

In addition to deploying deputies to protect schools, the Sheriff’s Office offers training to citizen groups wanting to learn how to react in the event of encountering an active shooter.

The agency connects with the community through Coffee with a Cop events plus Knock and Inform campaigns, in which deputies canvass neighborhoods with informational flyers on ways residents can protect themselves from becoming a victim of burglary, vehicle break-in or other crimes. The Sheriff’s Office provides home and business security surveys with a crime prevention specialist; call 239-252-0700 for scheduling.

Sheriff’s employees certainly deserve credit. 2017 was a year when Rambosk’s agency was challenged to help deal with several major wildfires requiring substantial neighborhood evacuations, then flooding episodes from record rainfalls and ultimately Hurricane Irma.

Thank a deputy.

Kick

Blame state Rep. Matt Caldwell.

We’ve opined this week about the Florida Legislature’s unfair move to potentially wrest from Collier and Lee voters the right to vote for or against local-option sales taxes in Nov. 6 referendums. Lee’s half-percent sales tax would tackle school building needs; Collier’s 1 percent would address infrastructure and key community programs.

More than 60 of Florida’s 67 counties already decided local sales-tax issues before lawmakers restricted Collier and Lee from doing so unless they first submit to a state-controlled performance audit. The requirement was amended onto a tax-relief bill as the 2018 session was ending.

The Fort Myers News-Press editorial board has pointed to Caldwell, R-North Fort Myers, as originating the idea as an amendment to another bill that passed the House but died in a Senate committee. It then was resurrected in the waning days as an amendment to a tax-relief bill, which passed both chambers and was signed into law.

“Caldwell, a master at understanding the bill process after eight years of maneuvering his own bills through the process and into law, threw the audit amendment onto the deep pile that is the tax bill,” The News-Press recently wrote in criticizing the maneuver.